Elizabeth Smart is showing the world a side of herself many people never saw coming, and she is doing it with the same honesty that has shaped her life for years.
On April 21, the 38-year-old survivor and advocate revealed on Instagram that she has quietly become a bodybuilder, sharing a striking photo from the April 18 Wasatch Warrior competition in Salt Lake City. Wearing a blue competition outfit and flexing onstage, Smart admitted the reveal might surprise people. “I understand the shock,” she wrote, adding that if anyone had asked her a few years ago whether she would ever enter a bodybuilding show, her answer would have been “absolutely not.”
The moment was bigger than fitness alone. For Smart, it was also about fear, shame, and finally refusing to let either one decide what she could do.
Elizabeth Smart Says Bodybuilding Helped Push Her Past Old Fears
Smart said the Wasatch Warrior event was actually her fourth competition, but the first one she felt ready to share publicly. She explained that she had held back before because she worried people would judge her, take her less seriously, or see her as less worthy of continuing her work as an advocate for survivors.
That hesitation, she said, ended up feeling painfully familiar.
She wrote that those thoughts reminded her of what too many survivors deal with, and that realization changed something for her. “This was a big change for me, it was hard, it pushed me, challenged me not to give up,” she said. “I am so proud of myself for doing this. I am so proud of my body, and I want to celebrate it.”
Smart, who shares three children with husband Matthew Gilmour, said getting older has made her more aware of how important it is to fully live now instead of waiting and ending up with regret.
Why Her Story Still Hits So Hard Decades Later
Smart’s bodybuilding reveal also brought fresh attention to the story that first made her known to the world. She was abducted from her family’s Salt Lake City home on June 5, 2002, at age 14.
In the early hours of the case, investigators led by Salt Lake City police captain Cory Lyman looked closely at the Smart family, as police often do in child abduction cases. They seized 12 family computers, conducted extensive interviews, and eventually cleared Elizabeth’s relatives, including her father Ed Smart, who passed a polygraph.
The investigation then swerved through several painful dead ends. Contractor Richard Ricci was arrested on June 14, 2002, after some of Lois Smart’s jewelry was found in his possession, but he denied involvement in the kidnapping. He died from a brain aneurysm in custody on August 27, 2002, leaving investigators with no clear path forward.
The major break came about four months after the abduction, when Elizabeth’s 9-year-old sister Mary Katherine remembered the name “Emmanuel,” which was used by drifter Brian David Mitchell. Despite police hesitation, the Smart family pushed the information into public view. That decision helped lead to Mitchell being recognized when he arrived by bus in Sandy, Utah, with Elizabeth and Wanda Barzee on March 12, 2003, about nine months after she was taken.
Mitchell was later convicted on December 11, 2010, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Barzee pleaded guilty in 2009 and was released in September 2018.
Today, Smart’s life looks very different. She is a leading voice in the fight against sexual violence and founded the Elizabeth Smart Foundation in 2011. She is still speaking, advocating, and now, clearly, still surprising people. This latest chapter is not about shock value. It is about ownership, confidence, and refusing to stay inside the version of herself the world expects.
